"Oh please. I am fairly sure that the constitution doesn't specify the building of roads, bridges, provision of education, etc., but every person in the country benefits from these. "
And thus would benefit from freeing critical infrastructure from the vagaries of federal funding.
"The elephant in the room that very few people are talking about is cutting the military-intelligence-industrial complex."
Obviously where the largest slice of the pork is concentrated, I agree. Anyone that claims to be 'tea party' but is not serious about reducing the size scope and cost of the US military dramatically is a fake - just another politician flopping in the wind for votes.
That's $95/3=31 and some change. 31 hours of HBO a month would cost slightly less than that cable bill. Does HBO produce that many hours of new material in an average month? Most shows produce one new hour a week, and only part of the year, right?
Taxes in excess of those required to fulfill constitutional mandates. Easy.
"Because once you start cutting revenue you have to start cutting programs. And once you start cutting programs you run into the problem that SOMEONE thinks that that particular is not "excessive"."
Yes indeed, this is how dirty politics works. Everyone votes for the whole pile of pork in order to keep the one program that actually benefits them personally. The weight of all the unproductive expenditures drags down the economy as a whole and makes the nation poorer, but the 'elite' who are already rich and well connected will still manage to get richer by diverting the lions share of those expenditures even while the rest of us struggle to keep our heads above water.
The only solution is to kill all the pork in one swipe. Most people will give up their own slice, as long as everyone else does the same simultaneously. But no one is going to willingly give up their slice, however pathetic, without getting a refund on the rest of the pork at the same time.
"Unless you are doing something completely novel, don't reinvent the wheel."
Exactly why I said I would think about looking for the library first instead of the language.
"If by chance this library doesn't have the performance you need, it will be easier to tune it for speed as compared to starting from scratch."
False dichotomy. Performance tuning is not something you just pick up overnight like a new language can be, it's serious stuff. If you have to do that yourself you might as well do the whole job and forget about the crappy library. Find one that is already optimized for the tasks that your app will spend most of its time and resources on, then use the most convenient glue to make it work.
A lot of people will propose a language because it is their favorite. Others because they believe it is very easy to learn. I will give you a third line of thought.
I would not look for a language in this case, I would look for a library, then teach myself whatever language is easiest/quickest to access it. I would try to profile what you are building, figure out where the bottlenecks are likely to be (profiling your existing mockup can help here but dont trust it entirely) and try to find the best stable well-designed high performance library for that particular type of code.
"Especially garcon. That's just a french word. If any one in a restaurant calls for their garcon they're either incredibly stuck up or are taking the piss."
Eh, I would argue that it occurs more than often enough in English to count as an English word, particularly since it does have a distinct (though related) meaning from the French word. He's not (unless I badly misread him) using it in its French meaning but in its English meaning - it's a word that would be used by an idiot who considers himself a snob, or more likely in a parody of someone that others see as such. In this case, I believe he was indeed 'taking the piss' with it in a sense, but not necessarily in the sense you meant.
I never said anything about 'easily.' It's a very difficult problem. I am not saying there is a perfect solution either. But they arent even trying.
There are a lot of inter-related issues here but specifically the article is talking about botting. Basically botting just means automating repetitive tasks in the client. It's a very natural and predictable desire for anyone playing a game that involves a lot of repetitive tasks to find some way to automate them on the client-end, and if the client is a PC then the more technical players are going to find a way to do that. There is no technical 'fix' for this and acknowledging that is important. It cannot be fixed it can only be worked around.
Now we could go off down the decades long history of workarounds, but I will try to skip to what's important. You see, the main damage that botting does to the game is to disadvantage the people that dont do it - they find that they progress so much slower than the ones who do that they get disheartened and quit. The authoritarian game admin will reflexively respond to this by prohibiting the use of bots - but this NEVER improves the situation. The technical folks whose advantage he is trying to disrupt, are also the least likely to be caught violating the new rule. It's the other gamers that the admin is actually trying hard to retain who are most likely to somehow stumble into the world of botting, slip up and get caught, and then banned.
A better solution, in general, is to allow it and make it easy for all players to do, so that they are on a more even playing field. Because most of the burnt out players arent going to be stressing on botting qua botting, they are stressed on the fact that other people are doing it and they cant!
Now on a game with any sort of role playing feel to it, there is still another problem - bots running around skilling up or making money or whatever and not responding to you really blow the whole immersion thing. But once we have focused more narrowly on the problem there, it is not intractable. What we did on my old Mud was legalize 'at keys' botting (where the client is running a script, but the player is still near enough to see the screen and respond if needed) and only outlaw afk botting.
That worked great on a system with ~300 players and ~4 immortals on at any given time, but WoW may well be running with far fewer admins. Again, to save money. And look, I got no problem with them wanting to save money and make a profit, but do you have any clue how much money they rake in on this thing? It wouldnt kill them to hire a little staff.
"Your botting software is nothing but run-of-the-mill malware"
Umm, no. Run of the mill malware by definition is acting without the informed consent of the user. This botting software is running at the will of the user. So the comparison is utterly specious.
"Why is it so hard to write addon software that conforms to Blizz's ToS?"
Why is it so hard for Blizzard to write a system that does not effectively penalise those who obey their rules?
Now I have years of experience running multiplayer online games and I appreciate as you may not that the answer is actually quite complicated. It's not a trivial thing to do, but then again, Blizzard has raked in enormous sums of cash on this game, more than enough to have done it right and many times over. It's an enormous profit-centre and like all the big companies these days it seems to believe that it has a divine right to maintain that profit without working for it. They would rather write unenforceable rules and invoke state force as a bandaid than try to fix the problem because it's cheaper - at least for them, at least in the short term.
The state shouldnt allow itself to be used in this way, however.
So you are saying that bulk freight is faster than overnight air? Come now.
Obviously there can be tradeoffs between wide pipes and fast pipes for different applications. If you are trying to move a large number of sandbags across the country and speed is less important, you want bulk freight. But not because it's "faster."
"That is because the parent is more interested in being their kids friend than their kids parent."
Do you suppose that might have something to do with the fact that laws have been changed around the world that make it a criminal act to discipline a child physically?
Not going to deny that idiot parents might use that abusively, but good parents who used a strap of leather or a birch sapling on the rare occasion when you got completely out of line were the regular thing when I was a kid - now these people would be jailed and their children put in foster care.
"Apple will still be able to select a country like Bermuda as its tax residence,"
Good.
"but it's a step in the right direction."
What? No it's not.
Now you are free to think it is and make an argument for it if you want, but simply asserting it as if it needed no defense? Please. Corporate taxation is a fraud, it's just extra overhead and expenses paid for by consumers anyway.
A step in the right direction would be expanding tax shelters so that us little people can use them too, not just the big boys.
I know that's how they look at it, but the fact is they are putting out a (very poorly done) webpage. They dont appear to understand what a webpage is. A webpage has no 'appearance' to be modified - it's appearance is the result of layout decisions made by the rendering agent which may or may not even have a visual display. So prohibiting their cattle from 'altering appearance' here is worse than stupid, it's nonsense. There is no appearance to alter.
If they dont like that (and it's clear they dont) then their remedy is to get the f off the web and build their own infrastructure that will work as they wish.
Of course they arent going to do that either. And as long as idiots in huge numbers keep signing in and implicitly supporting this travesty, providing them with a profit motive, they are just going to keep crapping all over the web.
The solution is not social fixer. The solution is to just say no to facebook.
"The correct terms are throughput vs. response time"
Thank you. I actually misused 'bandwidth' egregiously in my initial post and I am shocked no one has flamed me for it yet, but at least you pointed it out, if indirectly.
Throughput just doesnt equate to 'speed' even approximately though. Response time (latency) does so it's hardly unreasonable of me to point out that marketing has no idea what they are talking about. Preserving the language of Shakespeare from these cretins is in everyones interest.
"Throughput matters for many applications including video streaming."
Yes, it does. But that doesnt mean it is accurately characterized as 'speed.'
"Only interactive applications, such as tele- or videophone require low ping rates, meaning low response time."
Eh, not really true. Those are typically the applications where you see the effect first, but latency matters in all kinds of applications. Excessive latency can have all kinds of negative effects, including effectively destroying your available throughput (look up TCP windowing and buffer bloat.)
Because that fit the classic microsoft pattern - technically correct, but unresponsive/not relevant.
The time spent in the transmission of the signal is only one (probably the smallest one) of many factors that add up to produce the latency of the link.
It's a very good question. Often it has to do with obviously inferior/shoddy consumer electronics design, but even the better wireless hardware does still seem to impose significantly greater latency than an ethernet cable for the same distance, and even on the best of days.
On the worst of days, there is significant interference and that can cause a lot of retries and massive performance degradation, but that's a pile of different issues, whether sunspots or faulty wiring or the weather or whatever.
It's not "nowadays" it was baked into the internet from day one. It's a peer-to-peer network where it's expected that a node may appear as a server in one context and a client in the next. These clauses are only written into ISP contracts with an eye to forcing residential customers who generate 'too much' traffic to pay more for business, but once that tool is there in the contract it's only a matter of time before it is used more generally. And it makes no sense. They should just define specifically what the limits of the service is instead of writing in nebulous language about servers that could mean anything a lawyer wants them to mean.
No, it's a straightforward answer. The alternatives included Bob Barr and Ralph Nader. I voted for Barr but if we had preference voting I probably would have had Nader second.
The problem isnt that there are no alternatives. The problem is that people tend to believe the propaganda machine that tells them there are no alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
"Oh please. I am fairly sure that the constitution doesn't specify the building of roads, bridges, provision of education, etc., but every person in the country benefits from these. "
And thus would benefit from freeing critical infrastructure from the vagaries of federal funding.
"The elephant in the room that very few people are talking about is cutting the military-intelligence-industrial complex."
Obviously where the largest slice of the pork is concentrated, I agree. Anyone that claims to be 'tea party' but is not serious about reducing the size scope and cost of the US military dramatically is a fake - just another politician flopping in the wind for votes.
That's $95/3=31 and some change. 31 hours of HBO a month would cost slightly less than that cable bill. Does HBO produce that many hours of new material in an average month? Most shows produce one new hour a week, and only part of the year, right?
"Exactly what are "excessive taxes"?"
Taxes in excess of those required to fulfill constitutional mandates. Easy.
"Because once you start cutting revenue you have to start cutting programs. And once you start cutting programs you run into the problem that SOMEONE thinks that that particular is not "excessive"."
Yes indeed, this is how dirty politics works. Everyone votes for the whole pile of pork in order to keep the one program that actually benefits them personally. The weight of all the unproductive expenditures drags down the economy as a whole and makes the nation poorer, but the 'elite' who are already rich and well connected will still manage to get richer by diverting the lions share of those expenditures even while the rest of us struggle to keep our heads above water.
The only solution is to kill all the pork in one swipe. Most people will give up their own slice, as long as everyone else does the same simultaneously. But no one is going to willingly give up their slice, however pathetic, without getting a refund on the rest of the pork at the same time.
"Unless you are doing something completely novel, don't reinvent the wheel."
Exactly why I said I would think about looking for the library first instead of the language.
"If by chance this library doesn't have the performance you need, it will be easier to tune it for speed as compared to starting from scratch."
False dichotomy. Performance tuning is not something you just pick up overnight like a new language can be, it's serious stuff. If you have to do that yourself you might as well do the whole job and forget about the crappy library. Find one that is already optimized for the tasks that your app will spend most of its time and resources on, then use the most convenient glue to make it work.
A lot of people will propose a language because it is their favorite. Others because they believe it is very easy to learn. I will give you a third line of thought.
I would not look for a language in this case, I would look for a library, then teach myself whatever language is easiest/quickest to access it. I would try to profile what you are building, figure out where the bottlenecks are likely to be (profiling your existing mockup can help here but dont trust it entirely) and try to find the best stable well-designed high performance library for that particular type of code.
"Especially garcon. That's just a french word. If any one in a restaurant calls for their garcon they're either incredibly stuck up or are taking the piss."
Eh, I would argue that it occurs more than often enough in English to count as an English word, particularly since it does have a distinct (though related) meaning from the French word. He's not (unless I badly misread him) using it in its French meaning but in its English meaning - it's a word that would be used by an idiot who considers himself a snob, or more likely in a parody of someone that others see as such. In this case, I believe he was indeed 'taking the piss' with it in a sense, but not necessarily in the sense you meant.
I never said anything about 'easily.' It's a very difficult problem. I am not saying there is a perfect solution either. But they arent even trying.
There are a lot of inter-related issues here but specifically the article is talking about botting. Basically botting just means automating repetitive tasks in the client. It's a very natural and predictable desire for anyone playing a game that involves a lot of repetitive tasks to find some way to automate them on the client-end, and if the client is a PC then the more technical players are going to find a way to do that. There is no technical 'fix' for this and acknowledging that is important. It cannot be fixed it can only be worked around.
Now we could go off down the decades long history of workarounds, but I will try to skip to what's important. You see, the main damage that botting does to the game is to disadvantage the people that dont do it - they find that they progress so much slower than the ones who do that they get disheartened and quit. The authoritarian game admin will reflexively respond to this by prohibiting the use of bots - but this NEVER improves the situation. The technical folks whose advantage he is trying to disrupt, are also the least likely to be caught violating the new rule. It's the other gamers that the admin is actually trying hard to retain who are most likely to somehow stumble into the world of botting, slip up and get caught, and then banned.
A better solution, in general, is to allow it and make it easy for all players to do, so that they are on a more even playing field. Because most of the burnt out players arent going to be stressing on botting qua botting, they are stressed on the fact that other people are doing it and they cant!
Now on a game with any sort of role playing feel to it, there is still another problem - bots running around skilling up or making money or whatever and not responding to you really blow the whole immersion thing. But once we have focused more narrowly on the problem there, it is not intractable. What we did on my old Mud was legalize 'at keys' botting (where the client is running a script, but the player is still near enough to see the screen and respond if needed) and only outlaw afk botting.
That worked great on a system with ~300 players and ~4 immortals on at any given time, but WoW may well be running with far fewer admins. Again, to save money. And look, I got no problem with them wanting to save money and make a profit, but do you have any clue how much money they rake in on this thing? It wouldnt kill them to hire a little staff.
Running repetitive and simplistic quests can be just as much of a grind as any other type of grind.
"Your botting software is nothing but run-of-the-mill malware"
Umm, no. Run of the mill malware by definition is acting without the informed consent of the user. This botting software is running at the will of the user. So the comparison is utterly specious.
"Why is it so hard to write addon software that conforms to Blizz's ToS?"
Why is it so hard for Blizzard to write a system that does not effectively penalise those who obey their rules?
Now I have years of experience running multiplayer online games and I appreciate as you may not that the answer is actually quite complicated. It's not a trivial thing to do, but then again, Blizzard has raked in enormous sums of cash on this game, more than enough to have done it right and many times over. It's an enormous profit-centre and like all the big companies these days it seems to believe that it has a divine right to maintain that profit without working for it. They would rather write unenforceable rules and invoke state force as a bandaid than try to fix the problem because it's cheaper - at least for them, at least in the short term.
The state shouldnt allow itself to be used in this way, however.
"Clearly, what they demonstrated was that the mice would go for the item with the highest density of calories & fat."
Yes, indeed. "Researchers" have "proven" that food is addictive.
So is oxygen, btw. Just say no. Think of the children.
So you are saying that bulk freight is faster than overnight air? Come now.
Obviously there can be tradeoffs between wide pipes and fast pipes for different applications. If you are trying to move a large number of sandbags across the country and speed is less important, you want bulk freight. But not because it's "faster."
I never actually got annoyed enough by the static icons to be bothered figuring this out myself but apparently there is a fairly lengthy snippet to add to hosts to effectively block facebook at this point. Check out http://superuser.com/questions/544789/why-cant-i-block-facebook-using-etc-hosts-on-mountain-lion
National Security is the number one cause of National Insecurity. *
(Robert Anton Wilson gets credit for that, not I.)
"That is because the parent is more interested in being their kids friend than their kids parent."
Do you suppose that might have something to do with the fact that laws have been changed around the world that make it a criminal act to discipline a child physically?
Not going to deny that idiot parents might use that abusively, but good parents who used a strap of leather or a birch sapling on the rare occasion when you got completely out of line were the regular thing when I was a kid - now these people would be jailed and their children put in foster care.
You're missing my point.
I dont have to be gay to be inspired by Alan Turing. And I dont have to be female to be inspired by Ada Lovelace either.
Just a shot in the dark but was it OCAML?
"Her accomplishments continue to serve as an inspiration to women throughout the world."
Not to women, but to people of both sorts throughout the world.
Who wrote this tripe? Oh, right, an AC.
"Apple will still be able to select a country like Bermuda as its tax residence,"
Good.
"but it's a step in the right direction."
What? No it's not.
Now you are free to think it is and make an argument for it if you want, but simply asserting it as if it needed no defense? Please. Corporate taxation is a fraud, it's just extra overhead and expenses paid for by consumers anyway.
A step in the right direction would be expanding tax shelters so that us little people can use them too, not just the big boys.
I know that's how they look at it, but the fact is they are putting out a (very poorly done) webpage. They dont appear to understand what a webpage is. A webpage has no 'appearance' to be modified - it's appearance is the result of layout decisions made by the rendering agent which may or may not even have a visual display. So prohibiting their cattle from 'altering appearance' here is worse than stupid, it's nonsense. There is no appearance to alter.
If they dont like that (and it's clear they dont) then their remedy is to get the f off the web and build their own infrastructure that will work as they wish.
Of course they arent going to do that either. And as long as idiots in huge numbers keep signing in and implicitly supporting this travesty, providing them with a profit motive, they are just going to keep crapping all over the web.
The solution is not social fixer. The solution is to just say no to facebook.
"The correct terms are throughput vs. response time"
Thank you. I actually misused 'bandwidth' egregiously in my initial post and I am shocked no one has flamed me for it yet, but at least you pointed it out, if indirectly.
Throughput just doesnt equate to 'speed' even approximately though. Response time (latency) does so it's hardly unreasonable of me to point out that marketing has no idea what they are talking about. Preserving the language of Shakespeare from these cretins is in everyones interest.
"Throughput matters for many applications including video streaming."
Yes, it does. But that doesnt mean it is accurately characterized as 'speed.'
"Only interactive applications, such as tele- or videophone require low ping rates, meaning low response time."
Eh, not really true. Those are typically the applications where you see the effect first, but latency matters in all kinds of applications. Excessive latency can have all kinds of negative effects, including effectively destroying your available throughput (look up TCP windowing and buffer bloat.)
Do you work for microsoft?
Because that fit the classic microsoft pattern - technically correct, but unresponsive/not relevant.
The time spent in the transmission of the signal is only one (probably the smallest one) of many factors that add up to produce the latency of the link.
It's a very good question. Often it has to do with obviously inferior/shoddy consumer electronics design, but even the better wireless hardware does still seem to impose significantly greater latency than an ethernet cable for the same distance, and even on the best of days.
On the worst of days, there is significant interference and that can cause a lot of retries and massive performance degradation, but that's a pile of different issues, whether sunspots or faulty wiring or the weather or whatever.
So sick and tired of people equating bandwidth with speed. Is a tractor trailer faster than a Ferrari?
So what kind of ping do they get on this link?
It's not "nowadays" it was baked into the internet from day one. It's a peer-to-peer network where it's expected that a node may appear as a server in one context and a client in the next. These clauses are only written into ISP contracts with an eye to forcing residential customers who generate 'too much' traffic to pay more for business, but once that tool is there in the contract it's only a matter of time before it is used more generally. And it makes no sense. They should just define specifically what the limits of the service is instead of writing in nebulous language about servers that could mean anything a lawyer wants them to mean.
No, it's a straightforward answer. The alternatives included Bob Barr and Ralph Nader. I voted for Barr but if we had preference voting I probably would have had Nader second.
The problem isnt that there are no alternatives. The problem is that people tend to believe the propaganda machine that tells them there are no alternatives.